“Great,” said Nova, unable to muster even a hint of enthusiasm. The smell of the subway was all around her, and she hated being reminded of it after so many weeks of life aboveground. Though there were things that had been taken from her that day that she would like to have back, she had to admit that she wasn’t sad to have left their underground prison.
Sad to leave Ace behind, yes, but not sad to be gone.
“I’ve been doing some research on the Anarchists lately,” said Adrian. He found a plastic toy kitchenette behind the tents and started yanking open its mildew-covered cupboards. “Did you know Winston Pratt’s dad was a toymaker?”
Nova blinked at the back of his head. “No,” she said, and it was the truth. She knew little about Winston or who he had been before he was the Puppeteer.
“I don’t know this for sure, but something tells me this puppet he wants might have been made by his dad. Makes sense it would be something he’s attached to, right?”
Nova didn’t respond. She had spied a desk tucked behind a series of shelves.
Her desk.
“Couldn’t find anything about his origin story, though,” Adrian continued. “Or Phobia’s. Actually couldn’t find anything about Phobia.”
Nova pushed aside a rack hung with more of Honey’s dresses, making her way to the desk. “That’s odd,” she said half-heartedly, though, in truth, she knew hardly anything about Phobia either. With a power like his, so immersed in humanity’s greatest terrors, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know his origin. She did know there were times when Phobia seemed halfway normal. Like there could be just a regular guy under that cloak—quiet and solitary, with an odd sense of humor and subtle ambition.
Who had he been before? How had he become this?
If Phobia had ever given up these secrets, she didn’t know about it.
“But there’s lots out there on Honey Harper,” said Adrian with a chuckle. Nova glanced over to see him digging through a cardboard box labeled, simply, JUNK FOOD. “She grew up on a farm about fifty miles south of here. Claims that when she was twelve years old she stepped on a hornet’s nest. The stings sent her into anaphylactic shock and she passed out. When she woke up hours later, she was swollen up like a balloon.”
“Wait—she said this?” asked Nova.
“Uh-huh. It was in a newspaper interview, back near the start of the Anarchist revolution.”
Nova frowned. It was difficult to imagine Honey ever admitting to being swollen up like a balloon.
“But,” Adrian continued, “she survived, obviously, and she found the hive’s queen crushed under her shoe. After that, the whole hive was under her control.” He looked up at Nova. “Now, that’s an origin story.”
“Why are they always so traumatic?” she murmured. She reached the desk and pulled open the top drawer. Her heart surged. A set of screwdrivers greeted her, rolling around in the drawer. They were her first tools, scavenged by Ace when she was just four years old. She stroked one of the handles lovingly, not having realized she’d missed them until that moment.
“Cyanide has a sad story, too,” said Adrian.
Nova bit the inside of her cheek. She had heard Leroy tell his story before. A victim of bullying in high school, he had been accosted by some of his peers after a chemistry lab. Things got out of hand and soon they started to attack him—not just with their fists, but by dousing him with random chemicals and acids, too.
Although, when Leroy told the story, he liked to jump ahead to the part where he cornered his lab partner in a restroom and ensured his face would be forever even more hideously scarred than Leroy’s own. Nova remembered Leroy chuckling about it, but she hadn’t thought it was funny, not for either of them.
“Sometimes,” said Adrian, his voice sounding hollow, “it’s impossible for me to fathom why anyone would ever have joined Ace Anarchy. Why would anyone do such horrible things like the Anarchists did?”
Nova’s jaw clenched.
“But then I hear the stories and … I don’t know. Sometimes you can see how it makes sense, you know?”
Gathering the screwdrivers in her hand, Nova turned to face Adrian, checking that he was preoccupied before tucking them into a pouch on her belt. “Any luck?”
“No puppet, but … do you know what these are?” Adrian held up a shoe box full of jagged metal disks.
Nova’s eyes widened.
Adrian didn’t wait for her to answer. “Nightmare’s throwing stars. Heat-tracking, I think … or maybe motion-detecting? I don’t know, but they have caused us a world of trouble. Vicious little weapons.” He lifted one from the box, turning it over to inspect it from both sides. “I always wondered how they worked. We should probably take these up to research and development.”
“I’ll do it,” she said quickly. “That’s part of my job here, you know. Sorting through things … figuring out what could be useful … making sure it gets to the right people. I’ll run it over to them after my shift today.”
Adrian put the throwing star back into the box and slid it up onto a table.
Nova exhaled. “At least we don’t have to worry about her anymore, right? The other Anarchists are scary enough, but I sure am glad Nightmare’s been taken care of.”
“I suppose…，” Adrian said.
Nova frowned at him. “What do you mean, you suppose?”
He shrugged. “We haven’t really proven that she’s dead.”
Goose bumps raced down her arms. “What?”
Adrian started pawing through a trunk, mostly filled with cheap magic tricks and plastic party favors. “They never found a body, or … any evidence at all that she was killed.”
“Because she was obliterated,” said Nova, more forceful than she’d intended to be. “The Detonator’s bomb destroyed her. No wonder there was nothing left!”
“Maybe. I mean, it definitely caused a lot of damage, but … shouldn’t there have been something? Body parts? Blood?”
Nova gawked at him. All this time, all these weeks, she’d felt sure about this one thing, at least. This one thing that had actually gone right. She had faked her own death. The Renegades believed that Nightmare was gone. They had called off the investigation. It was one less thing for her to worry about, and she’d embraced it heartily.
And Adrian didn’t believe it?
“But … but no one could have survived that explosion.”
“You did.”
She froze.
“You were in the fun house when the bomb hit.”
“I … I was on the opposite side of the fun house,” she whispered. “And I was protected by a giant metal cylinder.”
Adrian’s lips tilted upward again, but she could tell he was humoring her. “I know. You’re probably right. She’s probably dead. I just … wonder about it, sometimes.”
“Well, don’t.”
He chuckled, but quickly became serious again. Sliding the cardboard box beneath the table, he stood. “You know, we never talked about what happened that day.”
Nova’s pulse jumped, and just like that, she was back in the neglected corner of Cosmopolis Park, and Adrian was telling her how worried he’d been when he thought she was dead, and he was stepping closer, and her breaths were coming quicker—